new york times

Eric Ellingsen and Dickson Despommier

Bina Ventkataraman in The New York Times covers vertical farms: "What if “eating local” in Shanghai or New York meant getting your fresh produce from five blocks away? And what if skyscrapers grew off the grid, as verdant, self-sustaining towers where city slickers cultivated their own food?"

The politicians are even getting into it; Scott Stringer, Manhattan borough president, is “sketching out what it would take to pilot a vertical farm,” and plans to pitch a feasibility study to the mayor’s office within the next couple of months, he said. “I think ...

David Dunlap, New York Times

When Alain Robert climbed the sunscreen on the New York Times building I wrote:
"the screen was an elegant and creative way for the New York Times to make a graphic expression of environmental concern by wrapping its building in an exterior sunshade like this. Alain Robert may claim to have climbed it for environmental causes, but in fact he has done the environment a huge disservice- it will be a long time before architects put exterior shades on buildings again. Thanks for nothing, Alain." Robe...

We were previously appalled at the new Disney Dream Home (read Disney's New Dream Home: Worse Than We Dreamed or go direct to the appalling video on the hideous website with the nauseating music. We concluded that Walt is spinning in his cryogenic cylinder.

Now David Rakoff of the New York Times visits it, and comes to much the same conclusion. "All this is worlds away from Disneyland’s original utopian domicile, the 1957 Monsanto House of the Future, sponsored by that company’s plastics division. Meant to re...

We have been showing each of the houses being built for the MoMA's Home Delivery exhibition, opening next week; The New York Times has a good slideshow of the houses. I think it is going to be really down to the wire for these...::New York Times

Other Prefabs in this Series So Far:
Home Delivery : BURST*008 : TreeHugger
Home Delivery : Digitally Fabricated Housing : TreeHugger

The article starts off really badly, with a picture of farmer Dan Gibson's modest little farmhouse with a porte cochère big enough to park a combine harvester, and a description of how the former VP of Starwood Hotels raises Angus cattle but spends his spare time in house that "has a theater that wouldn’t be out of place in a Steven Spielberg residence, a wine cellar and a log cabin annex with a magnificent dry stack stone fireplace, a billiards table and a stuffed bear and bobcat glowering down between beams made of North Carolina pine — each beam an entire mature tree."

It gets slightly better though, as Ralph Gardner describes how "In recent years, as the local fo...

From the lead editorial in today's New York Times:

Senators John McCain and Hillary Rodham Clinton have hit on a new way to pander to American voters: a temporary suspension of the federal gasoline tax between Memorial Day and Labor Day. The proposal may draw applause and votes from Americans feeling the pain of nearly $4-a-gallon gasoline. But it is an expensive and environmentally unsound policy that would do nothing to help American drivers. ::New York Times...

From a great graphic by Bill Marsh of the New York Times

The New York Times writes about the factors causing the rise in the price of oil, which hit $ 116 per barrel this week. Jad Mouawad hits all the usual suspects, such as the weak dollar, worries about terrorism (?) and demand, saying "Producers are struggling to pump as much as they can to quench the thirst not only of the developed world, but fast-growing developing nations like China and India, the two most populous countries." However he then goes on to say "The number...

The Times commissioned artist Gyongy Laky to create sculptural titles for each section.

Every newspaper and magazine on the stands has a green issue right now, and they are getting to be a bit repetitive. The New York Times has taken a different approach, calling it a catalog and covering dozens of issues, some obscure and some mainstream . It kicks off with a wonderful article by Michael Pollan, who answers the question "Why Bother?" Our own Jasmin Chua a...